An emphasis on community-focused engineering

ASU is teaching students how to take on societal challenges by integrating tech innovation and entrepreneurship

​Two recent events at the Arizona State University West Valley campus put a spotlight on student projects that are striving to lay groundwork for building stronger communities.

At a recent Entrepreneurship + Value Creation Demo Day event, several groups of students in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU presented projects to which they applied both technical and entrepreneurial concepts they learned over the spring semester.

About 20 engineering students also displayed a variety of tech-based projects at Integrated Engineering Innovation Showcase. Projects such as an accessible compostor, a metronome adapted for use by visually impaired musicians and a water recycling system for a gardening club reflected the emphasis on the kind of community-oriented engineering endeavors the school expects to expand on each semester.

At both events combined, 35 students exhibited the venture concepts and prototypes they had designed to address a variety of societal needs. Their assignments included mapping out strategies to overcome challenges they faced as they worked on engineering solutions.

Brent Sebold, an associate teaching professor and director of Entrepreneurship + Innovation at the Fulton Schools, led Demo Day activities along with Kristin Slice, director of community entrepreneurship in ASU’s J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute. Associate Professor Shawn Jordan, interim director of the School of Integrated Engineering, part of the Fulton Schools, orchestrated the Innovation Showcase activities.

Shawn Jordan (second from left), visited poster exhibits at the recent Demo Day and Innovation Showcase events that illustrated details about research projects students undertook during the spring semester. Photographer: Erika Gronek/ASU

Applying an entrepreneurial mindset 

Students enrolled in an Entrepreneurship + Value Creation course received guidance and mentorship from Slice.

They spent the semester developing a new toolkit for approaching real-world challenges with an entrepreneurial mindset. At the outset, they identified problems that were relevant to the communities they hoped to serve, then conducted weekly stakeholder interviews to refine their ideas and shape meaningful solutions.

Sebold and Slice say they are focusing on helping students build the skills of listening to people’s needs and translating thee insights they gain from those conversations into effective engineering innovations that address community challenges.

“Demonstrating they are able to do that is sort of their final exam in the course,” Sebold says.

A poster displays information about the School of Integrated Engineering, the newest of the eight Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.  The School of Integrated Engineering is focusing its educational and research endeavors on exploring new and innovative ways the various branches of engineering can be combined to provide sustainable solutions to a wide spectrum of today’s most pressing industry and community challenges. Photographer: Erika Gronek/ASU

In the week prior to Demo Day, students pitched their ideas to one another, offering each other feedback and refining their project proposals. From those proposals, the top three ventures were selected to move forward.

“Demo Day is really about a culmination and a celebration of the students who are transforming into the engineers and founders of the ventures of the future,” Slice says. “They have the opportunity to demonstrate they can listen, define a problem, devise a solution and plan to build a sustainable venture.”

Preparation for the showcase also gives students insights into employers’ recruitment processes and can improve their job prospects within engineering and related technological fields.

“Our main goal is to give students guidance on what constitutes the creativity, motivation and skill sets they need to make themselves attractive to prospective employers, and how to effectively communicate those things in job searches, resumes and interviews, so employers can see they are ready to step into industry roles,” Jordan says.

He adds that Demo Day and the Innovation Showcase gave students a venue to show how excited they are about their education and how they’re creatively applying what they’ve learned from their coursework and extracurricular endeavors.

“We’re already seeing students come up with some creative, thoughtful and meaningful solutions to a wide variety of problems,” Jordan says. “We are hoping to provide them even more valuable educational opportunities and impactful engineering experiences integrating disciplines, industries and communities in the future.”

Paving paths to multifaceted career opportunities

Innovation Showcase and Demo Day also highlight the School of Integrated Engineering’s curriculum, which emphasizes teamwork, critical thinking, communication and problem-solving skills in helping students develop competency in engineering design and thinking, says  Bahar Memarian, a Fulton Schools assistant teaching professor of engineering.

“Our courses that end with these showcase events offer students opportunities to learn both conceptual and hands-on knowledge and skills, practice engineering work in real-world settings and gain feedback from professionals to prepare them to network with employers,” Memarian says.

“The curricula raises students’ awareness of the potential societal impacts of their work, sparks creativity and innovation and facilitates students’ portfolio building and career readiness. This is achieved by introducing students to engineering design and thinking from an array of communities, industries and academic disciplines,” she adds.

Tyrone Benson, an electrical engineer and faculty associate in the School of Integrated Engineering, who recently came to ASU after more than 25 years in industry and teaches students about the semiconductor industry, sees both events providing opportunities for students to reinforce and expand on what they are learning in classes.

“These projects give students hands-on experience solving complex technological problems,” Benson says. “They’re building skills that will impress employers and open doors across a range of industries.”

Tyrone Benson (at left), a faculty associate in the School of Integrated Engineering, talks with Yarenci Soto Martinez (center) and Matthew Mullowney about their Demo Day project , a self-powered water filtration system designed for use in areas lacking access to electrical infrastructure. Martinez and Mullowney are both engineering science students in the Fulton Schools and Mullowney  also for works the Gary K. Herberger Young Scholar Program at the ASU West Valley campus. Photographer: Erika Gronek/ASU

Student projects provide problem-solving skills

Nawaf Alshuraya, an aerospace engineering undergraduate student in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, part of the Fulton Schools, says the FSE 301 Entrepreneurship and Value Creation course “provided valuable insights into what it truly takes to start and grow a business,” helping him better define and pitch his entrepreneurial venture at Demo Day.

“One of the most valuable lessons was understanding that solving a problem doesn’t guarantee success,” Alshuraya says. “You need customer trust, continuous validation and a strategy for how to grow sustainably. Many new ventures fail not due to a bad idea, but because they don’t adapt to real-world users’ needs.”

Connor Warn, a Fulton Schools’ mechanical engineering student in the same school, took on a project to craft artificial intelligence, or AI, software that would assist people who have demanding physical fitness goals and want to get in shape to live a healthier life.

“The course provided a great experience for me to be able to put my thoughts on paper and craft a well-designed pitch to present in front of various audiences,” Warn says. “This not only helps teach students how to develop entrepreneurial ideas but also helps us learn how to interview individuals outside the classroom and see where their needs lie.”

Warn’s project was selected among the top three venture proposals at Demo Day.

Tristan Huynh, a computer science student in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Fulton Schools, developed a portable braille device that connects to smartphones and is designed to overcome the difficulty of needing to use the text-to-speech function for those with visual impairments.

“I went through multiple prototypes, considering how many braille cells there should be, what functions the device should have in the form of buttons, and even a Bluetooth option,” Huynh says. “It would be valuable to schools for the blind by enabling students to learn braille while also staying up to date with modern technology.”

Huynh’s venture was awarded ASU’s eSeed Challenge, a key funding track within the university’s Venture Devils program, which strives to provide entrepreneurial experiences to students.

The development of his in-class startup is just one example of how engineering students are not only building technical solutions, but also taking steps to bring those solutions to life.

“Community project showcases like these recent events stay true to the mission of the School of Integrated Engineering to integrate the needs and aspirations of communities, industries and disciplines into the framework of engineering endeavors,” Jordan says. “I’m extremely excited that our students have had the opportunity to share their work, and I look forward to continuing to evolve our community-based engineering studies and activities.”